Being a single person with not too much time or money means that cooking tasty, well balanced meals is difficult and rare.  Usually, meal planning for the week goes a little like this...

1.  Think of great meal on Monday.  Make it.

2.  Have left overs of Mondays great meal for lunch on Tuesday.  Have cereal for dinner.

3.  Free lunch at school.  Have Monday's leftovers for dinner.

4.  On Thursday, have Monday's leftovers for lunch AND dinner.  Maybe for breakfast also.

5.  Friday, I might get sick of Monday's leftovers.  So I'll go out.  Or eat mac and cheese. 

6.  Saturday, eat Monday's leftovers for breakfast.  Then they're gone.  Finally.

Luckily, I have a great friend who also values good food, and not eating the same thing five days in a row.  So we've fallen into a great routine of cooking meals together a few times a week, providing variety, tastiness, good company, and most importantly, less leftovers.  On Thursday, we decided to go all out, and planned a meal to end all meals.  And it was phenomenal.  Not something we can make every week, but you gotta live a little, right?  So we made jumbo lump crab cakes, sweet potato risotto, and sauted asparagus.  The crab cakes crumbled a little bit (it's hard to hold that much crab together!), but other than falling apart on the plate, they were perfect.  Here's a picture of the spread.  Be jealous.

And if being a doctor doesn't work out... AND being a crab cake/risotto chef doesn't work out, I will just bake cakes.  The same friend and I entered a cake contest for Relay For Life.  The idea was that the RFL theme this year was "making birthdays possible", and we should clearly have cake for the birthday celebration!  Turns out, competition in the competition wasn't particularly steep, but we think we would have won either way... As it was, we DID win!  And it seemed like everyone enjoyed eating the cake, which is good because I didn't want to have to take any home.  Take a look at the cake baking process.  It took from 6:30pm Friday night until 3AM Saturday morning.  But it was worth it.

Assembling the cake from pieces... It took 5 cakes... and every drop of the coffee you see in the corner...

The cake was assembled and frosted.  Investing in a cake froster was worth ever cent of the $9.99 it cost.

Then we made LOTS of decorative icing in many colors and started the creative process... We ad libed a bit....

And here is the finished product!  Pretty good for no experience, I'd say. 

We may or may not have made a bit of a mess during this whole process... Impressively, we cleaned the whole thing up before going to bed.

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Side note:  Relay for Life was a HUGE success this year with a new location more teams, great weather, and obviously the best cake EVER!

Hope everyone else had a great weekend too!

Tomorrow will bring more lessons from the PICU...

Until then,

Kari